The mighty giant did not fall all at once once he was dead. Rampaging across the mountains, his feet wet with the blood of men and beasts, his heart was found and destroyed. A moment he stood, his head covered by clouds, the roar in his throat dying away in a slow fade. His legs gave, but there was so much of him to fall, it took what seemed a long time.
A long time I stood watching, my sword bloody and buried in his no longer pulsing heart. Staring out the window at the dim figure while the stench of sulfur rising from the stain of soot where the wizard had died burnt in my nose, I saw the slow, inevitable crash of his collapse against the mountain.
I saw before I heard, long before I could hear, the thunderous report. For him, to walk had been to cause earthquakes, but here was a cataclysm. Fissures spread and opened themselves, great canyons swallowed up cities, and the wizard’s tower pitched as the shockwave of his impact reached me.
I thought myself dead as surely as he had been, dead but for the falling. The tower of black stones keeled over, and I, who was trapped at its peak, my arm caught in the syrupy blood of the giant’s wounded heart, went careening with it toward the broken earth below.
But death can be a journey, or part of the journey of life, or it can be something else, a change, a transformation. The wizard had died in an eruption of hellfire, green flames rising up and licking the flesh from his bones. The giant died in a great fall; to his day, his half frozen carcass still casts its shadow over your people. I died in an inversion, a tower toppling over, but in that topsy-turvydom, death itself was inverted too. I was thrown fully into the dead mass that had been the giant’s heart, and cushioned in that pierced organ, thrown into its open wound, survived my return to earth.
I was baptized in the giant’s thick blood, and whatever spells the wizard had woven over it to make his brother immortal have so far stuck to me.
Tale Told 